Low Energy Properties of the Antiferromagnetic Quantum Critical Metal in Two Dimensions

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the low-energy effective theory for the antiferromagnetic quantum critical metal in two dimensions. The theory has been the subject of intense study for more than twenty years, due to the novel physics of non-Fermi liquid metals and its potential relevance to high-temperature superconductors and heavy-fermion compounds. In the first part of the thesis, we present the perturbative study of the theory in 3 minus epsilon space dimensions by extending the earlier one-loop analysis to higher-loop orders. We show that the expansion is not organized by the standard loop expansion, and a two-loop graph becomes as important as one-loop graphs even in the small epsilon limit due to an infrared singularity caused by an emergent quasilocality. This qualitatively changes the nature of the infrared fixed point, and the epsilon expansion is controlled only after the two-loop effect is taken into account. Furthermore, we show that a ratio between velocities emerges as a small parameter, which suppresses a large class of diagrams. We show that the critical exponents do not receive quantum corrections beyond the linear order in epsilon in the limit that the ratio of velocities vanishes. In the second part of the thesis, we present a nonperturbative solution to the theory in two dimensions based on an ansatz that is inspired by the perturbative analysis. Being a strongly coupled theory, it can still be solved reliably in the low-energy limit as quantum fluctuations are organized by the ratio of velocities that dynamically flows to zero in the low-energy limit. We predict the exact critical exponents that govern the universal scaling of physical observables at low temperatures.